Novelist Andrew McGahan has won Australia’s most lucrative literary prize, the $42,000 Miles Franklin Award, for his book The White Earth, “which is about a young boy’s experience growing up in rural Queensland.” An unattributed report from the Australian Broadcasting Company says the judges cited the way the book “revisits the conventions of the Australian pioneering saga and the gothic novel, investing them with remarkable imaginative force and contemporary significance . . . .” They also cited the way McGahan subjects “postcolonial Australia to a searing analysis.”